February 09, 2010

In
extremely troubling news, a whistleblowing nurse in Texas is being put on trial
for exposing that bad medicine was being practiced by a doctor. The nurse
sent a letter to the state’s medical board, detailing six specific cases (only
by file number, sans personal details) of questionable treatment, along with
showing evidence that the doctor was emailing patients about herbal supplements
that he “sold on the side.”

Nevertheless,
the sheriff of the Texas town, who is great friends with the doctor-in-question,
and who credits the doctor with saving his life from a heart attack, arrested
the nurse for “misuse of official information” – a third degree felony in
Texas.

After
the nurse was arrested last June, a surprise inspection by state investigators
found “several violations by Dr. Arafiles and concluded that the hospital had
discriminated against the nurses by firing them for ‘reporting in good faith.’”
From the article:

“To me, this is completely
over the top,” said Louis A. Clark, president of the Government Accountability
Project, a group that promotes the defense of whistle-blowers. “It seems
really, really unique.”

February 05, 2010

Complaints
of poor Marine mental health care at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina will be
investigated by the Defense Department following a request from a North
Carolina Congressman. The Congressman asked for the investigation following the
release of documents pertaining to the September firing of a brain trauma
specialist who worked as a contractor at Camp Lejuene and had made internal
complaints about the facilities, quality of care, and poor security. Salon.com,
which had originally reported on the firing, last week released the documents,
which showed Camp Lejeune officials had changed the psychiatrist's performance
evaluations from good to poor after he made the complaints.

GAP
is no stranger to Marine Corps retaliation against whistleblowers. Franz Gayl,
a former Marine and now civilian working for the Marines, faced unrelenting
retaliation from blowing the whistle on the bureaucratic holdup of putting MRAP
vehicles – which offer significantly greater protection to American troops than
Humvees – in the field.

There is an enormous danger to
Americans' privacy and a great propensity for error when government and private
sector partnerships are initiated without aggressive oversight and meaningful
regulation.

Alarm bells sound even louder when
the NSA is involved, considering the NSA's infamous record of teaming up with
the private sector to invade Americans' privacy in the name of national
security. George W. Bush's so-called "terrorist surveillance program," (a.k.a. warrantless wiretapping)
authorized under dubious legal reasoning from our favorite former-DOJ official
"torture lawyer" John Yoo, resulted in the NSA and telecommunications
companies doing an end-run around the 4th Amendment to dig into Americans'
private data without warrants.

Dennis Blair, Director of National
Intelligence, insists that the Google-NSA partnership is necessary for national
security, a mantra we've heard too many times to justify improper surveillance
and privacy-invading programs:

There are countless unanswered
questions about the Google-NSA partnership: Exactly what information will
Google and the NSA be sharing? What happens to that information? What
safeguards are in place to guarantee the information shared is kept out of
government databases when there is no reasonable suspicion of criminal
activity? What authority will the NSA use to obtain information from Google in
the name of cyber security? Will a neutral party oversee the partnership to
ensure Americans' privacy is protected?

Google
and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge
of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance
is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information
without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of
Americans' online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the
NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be
sharing proprietary data.

After all of the disastrous missteps
and proven illegality that the NSA has committed in recent years, it is
unacceptable that all the assurances we have that this program will protect
privacy and not result in illegal spying are from "anonymous
sources." It seems the NSA is once again saying "trust us,
we're the government." Frankly, while trusting the government is an
already dubious notion, it is downright laughable coming from an agency like
the NSA.

Cyber security is no doubt an
important issue. However, private sector cooperation with government
agencies, especially ones notorious for secret surveillance, should only be
undertaken where there are regulatory privacy safeguards and aggressive
oversight in place. Privacy should not be an area where we shoot first
and ask questions later. The right to be left alone is far too crucial to our
democracy to be cast aside by a few powerful government officials and corporate
executives.

Google should heed its own mantra - "Don't
Be Evil"
- before it leaps into bed with a government agency already known to toss out
the rule of law.

During a 2007 investigation,federal regulators found that a significant amount of
Toyotas accelerated without warning, but apparently couldn’t pinpoint the
problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Board Administration (NHTSA)
eventually concluded the problem only affected a small amount of cars and did
not inform consumers, despite the fact that they found at least three out
of every hundred Lexus (a Toyota brand) owners in Ohio were experiencing the unwanted
acceleration.

Does that
sound like a significant amount? You bet. From the article (WaPo):

"Anything
over 1 percent would raise a red flag, particularly for the manufacturer,"
said James C. Fell, who worked at the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration for 30 years, and was chief of research for traffic safety
programs.

The recent recall of 2.3 million
Toyotas and the unprecedented halt in sales of several popular models because
of faulty accelerator pedals raises questions about why Toyota and the NHTSA
had failed to bring the problem to light previously.

In another hit to Toyota's
reputation, the Japanese government has recently ordered Toyota to investigate
the braking system on the 2010 Prius, following which the United States said it
would begin an inquiry as well. This also raises questions about the efficacy
of the NHTSA, as111 of the 171 complaints filed with the
agency by 2010 Prius owners involved brake problems.

Climate science skeptics
had jumped on hundreds of emails and other documents obtained by an unknown
computer hacker from a British scientific center, the Climatic Research Unit at
the University of East Anglia, in late November.

Climate skeptics claimed
Dr. Michael E. Mann, author of some of the emails, seemed to indicate he
destroyed some data and was using a "trick" to manipulate other data.
The academic board at Pennsylvania State University, where Dr. Mann is
employed, defined "trick" as a term used by scientists and
mathematicians to refer to an insight that solves a problem in their ruling.
Dr. Mann also produced data and emails that skeptics claimed he had destroyed
to influence evidence.

Despite the ruling of
the board, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), an outspoken climate science skeptic,
is still calling for an independent investigation.

February 02, 2010

Wikileaks has published millions of
documents, and fought off more than 100 legal challenges since its inception in
2007. It is famous for posting, among other things, the U.S. military manual
for procedures at Guantánamo Bay, which included a list of inmates who would be
off-limits for the Red Cross, and the Australian Communications and Media
Authority's controversial blacklist of websites that would be banned under the
federal government's Internet censoring policy (turning out to be online poker
sites, YouTube links, and Wikipedia postings).

The groups’s officers announced its
plan to shutter the site in December unless it raised enough funds to continue
- but so far fundraising efforts have only netted $130,000, which amounts to a
little more than half its annual costs - not including pay for staff.

A statement
on the website claimed that Wikileaks had recently received hundreds of
thousands of documents pertaining to "corrupt banks, the US detainee
system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others," but no longer had
the resources to release them.